Friday, July 9, 2010

I don’t love the tilt, but when I rotated it, cloning and patching was proving REALLY difficult so I’m going to move on from that. First thing, white balance and exposure. Her skin is blue from sitting in the shade. So to warm her, I used a curves layer bumping red and yellow to counteract the cyan and blue.

It’s actually still pretty cool, so I duplicated my warm curve layer by pressing CNTRL J. It was TOO warm after that, so I lowered the opacity to about 60%.

Next, the issue of exposure. She’s underexposed and needs to be brightened. I decided to go with a screen light layer this time, which brightens and lightens.

I had lowered the opacity to about 50%, screen light layers are pretty powerful. Next, I wanted to bring out the colors, so I ran my color popping action, Popper.

You can do it by hand by selecting different colors in the scene and playing with hue/saturation. Next, I want to further pop the image by selective contrast, which I’m going to achieve by using my burn tool, set on “shadows” at 3%. It’s important to do this on its own layer so that your in control of how strong you want it to be.

Then, before flattening, I dropped down and chose “soft light” for my blending mode and brought the opacity down to 55%.

Beyond white balance, exposure, and contrast (the basics), I like to do a few creative things. It varies on my mood, the picture, and … my mood. :) I decided to try out a radial blur (at 25% opacity), and I masked her back in.

Right now, I think my processing is pretty harsh. Some will like the heavy contrast and pop, I prefer to mute some of it, make some haze. To do that , I flattened. Layer>New Fill Layer> Solid Color. And from there, I chose a soft blue.

This will cover your picture entirely in that blue. So, to alter that, just choose “lighten” and drop the opacity. I went with 33% opacity and 62% fill. I think I’m about done now. Here is the SOOC and my final.